


Don't Look Back

by WriterIsNinja



Category: Bleach, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Parent Kurosaki Isshin, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Overload, Empath Kurosaki Yuzu, F/F, F/M, Mutant Kurosaki Yuzu, Mutant Powers, Mutant Rights, On Hiatus, Stealth BAMF Kurosaki Yuzu, no beta reader we die like illiterates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-09-30 15:04:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20449079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriterIsNinja/pseuds/WriterIsNinja
Summary: Yuzu swallowed dryly. She knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She knows the lessons there, too.OR: Kurosaki Yuzu is a mutant, but that doesn't mean she's a fighter. Doesn't mean she couldn't be, either; just because she doesn't want a life drenched in blood doesn't mean she's only good for smiles and food and homemaking. Ichigo sees the way his sister wields a knife and never doubts Yuzu could be deadly if she wanted to be. Karin sees her smile and wonders if they'll all die of poison one day. Tou-san and the rest... well, the thing is this:Yuzu projects happiness because that's what she *wants*. It is not, necessarily, what she is *feeling*.(And yes, she could kill them all and smile while she did it.)





	1. Chapter 1

Her brother had lost his powers. They never _said_ he’d sealed two-thirds of his soul in the process. Looking at him more closely, rolling up the veil of film behind her eyes (a sort of mental defense she'd worked on, in actuality), she can see why he might not try to fight his death. The level of _pain_ he must be in for his soul to be throbbing red like that… but death wouldn’t fix it, and a sudden release of power would kill him just as surely.

Getting up to lock the door, Yuzu stood considering for a moment. She had done empathic healings before, even healed emotional tears on the inside of the soul (Ichi-nii was admittedly her first test subject for that, though grief wounds never closed without scarring – _badly_), but never something like _this_. Could she actually do it? Maybe, but if she didn’t try, he would die from the fever for certain, and the pain would linger beyond death.

Yuzu swallowed dryly. She knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She knows the lessons there, too.

_Finish what you started – and don’t look back._

She started this a long time ago; no use chickening out_ now._

She lays her left hand on his crown chakra and the right hand on his heart, first spreading a cool, icy blue from top to bottom. There will be a lot of colors tonight (color is emotion). The important part will be Ichi-nii getting better, living or dead. She just wants her brother to be happy, or at least less miserable. If a little empathy can loosen the binds on his soul… two hours later, Yuzu sees the bright sunshine yellow start to take in fits and starts, sliding into the cracks.

She smiles. It's not over yet, but she smiles.


	2. Chapter 2

Yuzu starts vomiting the second Ichigo starts to get better. Since she spent so much time with him while he was sick, only Karin looks twice at it. Vomiting, or at least nausea, isn’t too unusual for an empath in emotional overload, but she usually bothered trying to hide it. Yuzu had said it was an emotional thing, not actually contagious, and empathic shields were apparently a lot more difficult than telepathic ones, so… but Karin knows better than to ask exactly what her twin has been up to, seeing Ichi-nii almost not scowl, that pained fake-it-‘til-ya-make-it smile fading into something smaller but more genuine. She doesn’t know what the fuck the Shinigami did to him, but she’s none too impressed. If Yuzu managed to help with that somehow, she’s grateful, and not asking is the _least_ she can do. Goat-Face’s grief and false goofiness is already damn near crippling for her sister; Karin’s about the only one in the family that _doesn’t_ add stress to those fragile-seeming shoulders.

Yuzu calls Karin her rock.

“Rocks fall, everybody dies.” She recalls cackling at that explanation.

Apparently her feelings are very… steady? She feels what she feels and her actions follow, but only up to three emotions at a time rather than the desperate tangle most people are. Fellow empaths are apparently a Hell of a lot worse, too; too many of them are driven to suicide over feeling conflicting emotions like happiness and depression at the same time, unaware of how to purge. Few live to their teenage years, so there aren't many willing to act as teachers either. The only reason Karin doesn’t snap at Ichigo for his overwhelming guilt complex is that Yuzu doesn’t want him running away to sleep on the streets which, yes, he absolutely _would_, the dipshit. Also, the PTSD is hardly _his_ fault; that’s sort of what _happens_ when you’re put in the mold of a child soldier.

For all that Karin sees spirits better than Yuzu, she really_ is_ the only Kurosaki with a normal life. Yuzu may have been in the cooking and manga clubs, but that was because they were too focused on the activity to overwhelm her with emotion. Yuzu may be _in_ those clubs, but she doesn’t _socialize_ in them. (Which is fine in the manga club, but not so much the cooking club.) Otherwise she avoids people like crazy, playing the Yamato Nadeshiko. Which was a shame, because she’d _love _to be politically active regarding mutant rights in Japan, if politically active people weren’t so emotionally driven and on occasion prone to riots. Riots were _not_ good for an empath. Karin, on the other hand, plays soccer because she _enjoys_ it, enjoys socializing with people who share her interests. Karin may be getting lessons from the Shinigami now, but only so far as to protect herself and her family, not so much as to take on protecting the whole damn world fighting wars that aren’t hers. Add in Goat-Face and _his_ typical insanity and she’s the only normal person in the house.

Yuzu keeps her hair too short to need holding back, but Karin can still rub her back and hand her bottled water.

“I think I’m going down to Kaa-chan’s grave for a while,” Yuzu croaked.

Karin nodded. That was where Yuzu_ said_ she went when she needed peace, but she wasn’t entirely sure that her twin _stayed_ there. Still, she’d tell Ichi-nii when he asked.

Isshin wouldn’t ask.


	3. Chapter 3

Meditation is very, _very_ necessary when you’re an empath, and graveyards are quiet.

A black sun shone darkly on an ocean of milk farther than the eye could see, cloud-white sky melting into shimmering red-black sands that made up a desert dangerous to cross. The ocean, her thoughts, were quiet and buried deep (for now), but her emotions met her in a dull roar as she danced through the skin-splitting sandstorm toward the only pillar of silence, an old red adobe Spanish mission with wooden ladders crawling up it that made the eye of the storm. She’d met enough telepaths and empaths to know how to cripple an intruder, and storming seas and sands – thoughts and emotions being whipped to a frenzy – made a fair defense, though it wasn’t deliberate at the moment; only she and those that she allowed could breathe underwater, after all, it being her mind, and a storm in either could easily kill. Climbing the ladder to her Mind Palace’s second floor, she slid quietly into her Emotional Center, breathing in the peace as the heavy wooden door slammed shut behind her.

You could change your Mindscape, your Inner World – and she _had_ -, but it changed the way you thought.

“How did I know you’d be here?” Yuzu smiled as she met the silent figure at three full walls of psychology, neurology, and sociology books in both Japanese and English. The whole mission was a library of technical knowledge hidden within her emotional landscape; actual memories lay beneath the seabed.

Unable to speak, the woman didn’t bother to look up from _Cultural Implications of Subcultures_, as antisocial Yuzu pretended not to be while playing homebody as often as she could manage. The chapter on BDSM, if Yuzu wasn’t mistaken (so she was precocious), which meant she was craving some sort of emotional intimacy. Not too surprising, considering how much of Ichi-nii’s turmoil she’d had to take into herself to heal him only as much as she’d managed.

Yuzu walked to another section to pull up a book on Greek mythology, a well-worn and comfortable old favorite illustrated with painstaking care, and returned to lean into her best friend’s (who wasn’t her twin, anyway) side. Long nails stroked into her short, wind-mused hair.

This… this would work, for now, just reconnecting like this. It would do.


	4. Chapter 4

Yuzu knows, better than most, that the world only loves useful people, leaving them to shatter behind their masks alone. The world only loves useful people, and leaves that love aside when they’re not (Tou-san would have).

(She’s even less impressed with the Shinigami than Karin is.)

So five-year-old Yuzu made herself useful. She learned to cook after a week of cold-cuts because Isshin was drunk (useless) and Ichi-nii still in the hospital. She cleaned what she could the best she could, saved her mother’s things from the trash, and allowed Karin to be the strong one because she need to be to feel _useful_. By the time Ichigo came home to a perfectly clean house and a hot meal (furious that Isshin had let her use the stove unsupervised, then furious that he was drinking away grocery money and neglecting her and Karin, and furious with himself over whatever had killed Kaa-chan – that would become depression, later), she was already a Yamato Nadeshiko in the making, smiling at everyone and radiating cheer. No one but Karin, you see, saw the aftermath. No one but her twin saw the tears.

It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Ichigo enough to show them; it was that he was busy dealing with his own emotions, and she didn’t want him to be strong for _her_ when he was that messed up over it. Even then she’d known that seeing someone die was different than attending a funeral.

So she smiled and kept on until they had a new normal. Ichigo went out to make money (probably illegally; she kindly didn't ask), Isshin locked himself in the clinic and drank, Karin started to learn what she’d need to know for school, and Yuzu both studied _and_ took care of the house. She… hadn’t realized that the crippling pain wasn’t solely hers, at first, until she started seeing the colors. Yuzu had to teach herself to meditate, once she did, in order to purge the excess emotion before it _became_ hers. (That took… years, the meditation thing.)

Yuzu was the Ravenclaw of the family. Which was fine, because Karin was a Gryffindor like Kaa-chan, and Ichigo was a ‘claw-ish Hufflepuff (he may not have _advertised_ that level of intelligence, but neither did Yuzu, and he put his learning into practice rather than let it sit), and Isshin made for a half decent Slytherin if you weren’t an empath, so there were no Howlers for improper sortings in their house. Still, it was a good thing that Yuzu _did_ love learning, because keeping up with both school _and _the housework was difficult enough without adding club activities onto that.

Yuzu helped around the classroom – made herself _useful_ – and smiled.


	5. Chapter 5

There are days when Yuzu doesn’t want to crawl out of bed. She smiles and does it anyway, because she has to look forward – never, _never_ back. If she looked back, she would never stop crying (purging emotion isn't grieving, and she became the house's 'Little Mother' at age _five_), probably never crawl out of bed again. Dead from starvation via depression has a way of doing that. So she pastes on a smile, if a fragile one, and gets moving: always forward.

“Ichi-nii? Can you teach me some basic self-defense moves? Not sword moves, just… the basics.”

“Sure,” he nodded, as solemn as ever. “But is there a particular reason?”

“I, um… well, there’s this girl. Who’s a mutant.”

Ichigo chuckled.

“Of course. Do you need any, uh…?”

“I’ve got books,” she assured him at the awkward look, “and it’s mostly holding hands right now. Neither of us is legal yet, so….”

There _is_ a girl who’s a mutant: her name is Kurosaki Yuzu. The rest, though, is a bald-faced lie. He… apparently couldn’t care less about the girl part _or _the mutant part, though, which sends a wave of relief through her. Yuzu’s smile brightens automatically.

“Got it,” he nodded sharply, then, with a blush, “Do me a favor and don’t remind me when that changes? I don’t want to know about your… sex life. _Kami_,” he hissed, “…unless you need birth control or date money.” Ichigo swiftly changed tracks. “Now anything can be a weapon, even a pencil, but if it gets knocked out of your hands, you want to hold your fists like _this_.”

Always forward; don’t look back.


	6. Chapter 6

“I have a group assignment,” Yuzu turned to Karin in a panic.

“_Breathe_,” her twin demanded. Yuzu took a deep, shaky breath. “You wanted to practice your social stuff to prepare for the rally in a couple of months, right? This is just practice, Yuzu; it’s _okay_ if you fail at practice the first time. You’ve been putting it off anyway, and if you keep doing it you’ll be completely unprepared. You hate being unprepared – _nerd_,” she grinned. “Just focus on the emotions of the calmest person in the room, okay?”

“Forward,” she muttered to herself, making Karin raise an eyebrow. “Just jump in and don’t look back?”

“Sure,” Karin shrugged. “If you tune out all but one person and keep practicing at that, they can’t overwhelm you as bad as Goat-Face does, can they? Get your research together like the closet Ravenclaw you are and talk to them about it like they’re me, and if you need it, take five to meditate the excess away. If they ask, you have panic attacks and not crippling social anxiety via mutant powers, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can do that,” Yuzu nodded to herself firmly. “How do I keep practicing after the project is done, though?”

“Well, you could try talking recipes to a relatively calm person in the Cooking Club, though not that one that panics at every cooking mistake obviously, or talk to someone about that manga you’re working on about the Yamato Nadeshiko serial killer, ask opinions on some art thing you're fiddling with. Which is sorta creepy for me since you _play_ a Yamato Nadeshiko, by the way,” Karin grinned, “but the _Manga_ Club is hardly going to look at you sideways for it, since they mostly share your social dysfunction. And if you get _that_ far, offer to tutor someone in English; it’s not like either of us could fail that class, considering how obsessed Ichi-nii is with Shakespeare and other English Literature. Just… try one-on-one things, at first,” she recommended with a shrug.

“_Thank you_, Karin,” Yuzu smiled sincerely, engulfing her twin in a tight hug.

“You’re my sister," she waved it off.


	7. Chapter 7

Ichigo hadn’t thought much of it when Yuzu told him she was going to a rally in Tokyo. _Now?_ Now he was regretting all of his life choices.

“Sweet Kami, Yuzu, what the Hell _happened_? Karin, get the first aid kit!”

“The protest may have turned into a riot!” Yuzu grinned, bouncing like a maniac as blood dried on her chin and her left eye swelled, the older guy friend barely able to hold her in check so she didn’t bounce off the walls.

“She punched a police officer and kneed a few guys in the balls,” her friend deadpanned, lips twitching. “For someone so tiny, she sure makes a Hell of an impact. I think she’s gone manic on the adrenaline. And maybe wrenched her knee.”

“_Of course _you’re one of those people who get high off a good brawl,” Ichigo face-palmed. “Of _course_ you are.”

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised, Ichi-nii,” Karin snorted, handing him the EMT-Grade First Aid Kit as he muttered something about a Yachiru. “If you think Yuzu would panic, you don’t know her too well. I’m just surprised she didn’t come back in a _rage_.”

She met the eyes of the older kid, who nodded discretely. So it _had_ been a problem, until she’d focused on someone enjoying the fight – or the adrenaline kicked in. Could be either/or.

“I didn’t think she’d panic; I just didn’t think she’d be using our self-defense lessons to slug _police officers_! Your chin is gonna need stitches,” Ichigo warned more calmly as he patted away the blood with a damp cloth. “Me or the clinic?”

Her eyes had a mad gleam, so Karin was the one who answered.

“You do it, Ichi-nii; we trust you.”

The implication being that they didn’t trust Isshin (especially without a cover story in place), of course. Karin went to get that nasty electrolyte drink her brother sucked down all too frequently from the fridge.

“Thanks for bringing her home…?”

“Akiyama Eiji,” he introduced with a wry smile. “If she comes to another one, I’ll keep a closer eye on her.”

“Thanks,” Ichigo grunted, “and we probably can’t stop her from going to the next rally; she has lying to Dad with a smile down to an artform. Did her girlfriend go with her?”

At the brief flare of panic (and lucidity) in Yuzu’s eyes, Karin covered her ass like the awesome twin she was.

“They broke up late last week; Yuzu wasn’t too broken up about it since they’re friends still. She chickened out on the protest, unfortunately, but Yuzu still wanted to go.”

“I’m gonna have to teach you more than the basics, kid,” Ichigo sighed as he finished up with the dissolvable stitches, tilting her chin to make sure he’d gotten them as even as possible. He nodded to herself and forced her to sit at the table, examining her knee. “It’s not the knee; the tendon is off. When you calm down, Yuzu, you are _not_ going to enjoy the physio massage for that. The only reason you can’t tell it’s hurting right now is the adrenaline rush.”

“What’s our story to Goat-Face?” Karin frowned, handing over a bag of frozen peas for Yuzu to hold against her black eye.

“One of my more _stupid_ Yakuza enemies saw her with me when I helped her with the groceries last week, I guess?” Ichigo shrugged. “And caught her alone. It’ll give me good reason to teach her more self-defense, anyway. Maybe shove her in Aikido lessons, too; Yuzu’s got the build for that. She’s too precise to be a brawler like me.”

“Uh… my little sister’s Bipolar, so I can tell you right now Yuzu-chan’s gonna puke out that high when she comes down from it completely. And she’s coming down _now_.”

He was right; the adrenaline crash was coming down hard. Yuzu was rapidly turning grey with exhaustion and the empathic equivalent of shock.

“Thanks, Akiyama-san; I’ll get a waste bin,” Karin smiled briefly, running off. She’d grab the comforter, too.

“You’re a good big brother, Akiyama-san,” Ichigo told him sincerely.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update for jesuisordure with the lovely comments. Unfortunately school starts up again soon, so my updates will be less frequent, but for you I churned this out before I can get stuck in RL muck.

“So I covered your ass back there, but what’s this about a girlfriend?” Karin asked as she stoked her sister’s hair. Yuzu couldn’t stop shivering, even under three blankets.

“I told Ichi-nii there was a girl who was a mutant to get him to train me, implying the girlfriend thing,” she admitted sheepishly. “He reacted so _well_, though. I honestly wasn’t expecting to need more than basic hand-to-hand and escape tactics. The protest was supposed to be peaceful – and it _was_, until the police blocked _us_ but let the _counter-protesters_ break through our lines without trying to stop them. It got… pretty bad in there, Karin. I went nuts on the rage and betrayal people were feeling out there, though I got a reporter who caught it all on camera out of the line of fire; it should be going live tonight.”

“Nuts _physically_, or…?”

Karin worried about Yuzu being discovered. There were, after all, non-mutants on _both_ sides of the issue, both enemy and ally alike. If Yuzu’s powers could be kept quiet, people thinking her a young human ally, that could only help her cause.

“I knocked out a large group projecting some little kid's terror at them, but not close enough to me for anyone to notice, I think,” she sighed heavily. 

“Take a nap,” Karin kissed her forehead.

Ichigo stood in the doorway. Karin froze, but he beckoned her out into the hallway.

“How long have you known?” he asked softly.

“Since we started school,” Karin sighed quietly. “Yours and Goat-Face’s grief after Kaa-chan died sent her active – more Goat-Face than you – but she didn’t realize the pain wasn’t all hers until we joined the school system and she was feeling _everyone_. She didn’t know who to talk to, so her twin was a safe bet.”

“Did Yuzu not trust me?”

He look hurt, but not terribly shocked.

“You were dealing with your own shit, Ichi-nii; she didn’t want to put more pressure on you at that point, and the longer she didn’t say anything, the harder it got to. She was honestly more worried about your reaction to the bisexual thing than the mutant crap. You’re basically our only parent, you know,” Karin pointed out. “If you’d reacted badly, it would have crushed her, and when you see kids thrown out of their homes for _two_ of the things that make you different…. Yuzu loves you, Ichi-nii; she was just scared once she realized how society tended to react to people like her.”

“So when she gave me the mutant girlfriend thing as a reason to learn to fight, that was just testing my reactions?”

“And you passed with flying colors,” Karin agreed. “Now imagine that same conversation with _Goat-Face_. Even with the leeway Yuzu gives him due to grief, she doesn’t trust that he’ll be on her side thick and thin. You’re a damn _Hufflepuff_, that’s not a worry with you.”

He snorted at the comparison. She wasn’t wrong.

“It just… niggled at the back of her mind, that love can be taken away, not unconditional for most people. She wanted you to be the one it _wasn’t_ conditional for, but… didn’t dare to hope when most of her people end up street kids. Yuzu loves you, Ichi-nii; she just has a lot of baggage from Goat-Face’s abandonment those first two years.”

“Yeah,” Ichigo sighed. “Yeah, I’ll just have to be there for her _now_.”

“That’s all we can ever do.”


	9. Chapter 9

“This is Eiji-kun’s friend, Kurosaki Yuzu; the last rally was her first one.” Several people winced, mostly on automatic, in sympathy. The black eye was throbbingly obvious. “Yuzu-chan, the M-Activist Organization Committee, AKA our support group plus alcohol. Do you speak English? We have a few members who are still working on their Japanese.”

“English is fine,” Yuzu agreed in the proper language.

“Dasha escaped the Communist Bloc via a circus and is living on false papers; don’t ask,” Eiji-kun murmured in her ear.

“Don’t ask until I have a drink in hand,” the seventeen-year-old corrected. “Once I’ve cracked open the vodka, ask anything you like. Ozimova Darya Filipovna, shapeshifter and professional escort, but you can call me Dasha, kid.”

“A pleasure, Dasha-san,” Yuzu smiled hesitantly.

“So, what’s your story?” a girl who was maybe half Japanese asked as she rubbed at her glasses with the hem of her shirt. “Oh, I’m Kitamori Katherine, technopath and forger for hire; just Kit is fine.”

Eiji-kun placed a comforting hand on Yuzu’s shoulder with a firm squeeze.

“I’m, uh… I’m an empath. I came into my powers at age five when Kaa-chan died.”

“_Ouch_,” the majority winced, looking (and feeling) altogether impressed that she was still _alive_ at her age considering the circumstances. 

“My nii-san just found out – he took it really well, actually – but we’ve agreed not to tell our father.”

“Good idea,” Kit-san muttered. There was obviously a story there.

“How are you so sane?” a younger boy asked tactlessly.

“_Gideon!_” Kit-san snapped out, appalled.

“It’s fine,” Yuzu waved off with a chuckle. “I’ve met enough of my fellows to know that sanity is rare. I’m not, entirely, but what sanity I _do_ have is down to my twin Karin, who acts as my Anchor. She has a very steady emotional climate.”

“Think that’s down to evolution?” Eiji-kun asked.

“Maybe,” Yuzu considered. “We don’t have a telepathic link like some twins, so it’s possible there’s a natural _empathic_ link. We _were_ born for each other, after a fashion.” 

“Let’s not depress the newbie,” a young woman who briefly introduced herself as Takahashi Fujiko (who apparently worked as an aide in the House of Councilors) and her husband as Kensuke (a journalist) sighed. “Let’s get to the things that _enrage_ us. Anyone else heard word of the Self-Defense Forces Mutant Security Bill?”

“Conscription,” the kid, Gideon, snapped.

“You’re not wrong, brat,” Kensuke-san agreed as he passed Dasha-san a half-empty bottle of vodka with foreign labels that smelled a bit like paint-thinner (so probably moonshine vodka), pulling out a flask of what Yuzu imagined was whiskey. “It doesn't even state the mutant has to be of age. I’m going to break the story before official word gets out that will make the government look better, but we need actual Lobbyists on this one.”

“I’ve got some high-profile clients I can talk around,” Dasha-san smirked.

“And I’ll get the internet in an uproar once you’ve published,” Kit-san agreed.

“My brother will be looking into colleges soon," Yuzu said nervously. “I could get him to pass around a petition, if we write one up. Some college students will sign anything, and future voters mad at you tends to make Prime Ministers nervous."

“Get the girl some sake,” Fujiko-san laughed. Eiji-kun looked nervous, since he’d be the one bringing her home, but Kensuke-san merely toasted with his flask and grabbed a bottle and a glass from the makeshift bar for her. Eiji seemed relieved when she merely sipped, but then, he wasn't aware she was allowed to drink as long as it was supervised (not that the MAOC made for wise supervision, it seemed). "Help plan the next protest with me, Yuzu-chan; you’ve got a decent head for politics."


End file.
